Earth First! Journal Hosts Film Festival in Lake Worth This Weekend

Our favorite local green anarchists are having a party in Lake Worth this weekend, taking it to the silver screen for three days of cinematic rabble rousing. The films are documentaries all, which you may not think your cup of meat, but the subject matter is wild stuff, much of it out on the hairy fringe of political activism, where action speaks and John Law listens, takes names and kicks butts.

The event is sponsored by the Earth First! Journal (an affiliate of the radical environmental group Earth First!) which, by some strange riptide in the zeitgeist, washed ashore in Palm Beach County three years ago. It's the second consecutive year they've held a film festival, this time around keyed to what they believe is a broad current of resistance newly evident in pop culture.

Writing in the journal last spring, EF!J collective member Panagioti Tsolkas touted the "subversive potential" of the newly-released Catch a Fire (the second film in The Hunger Games trilogy) and cited everything from the riots at the 1913 debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to

Avatar, to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Bruce Springsteen's last album Wrecking Ball, the re-release of Les Miserables, the re-re-release of Lord of the Rings, the new young-reader craze Divergent.

Tsolkas argues that activists should "view these books, albums, shows and films as opportunities to speak broadly to the masses of people beaten down by apathy and consumerism" and use them as "symbols and tools for anxious insurgents to run wild with."

We wish we shared his optimism.

All the same, the films sound damned interesting, including The Carbon Rush, an inside look at the multibillion dollar world of carbon emissions trading; Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade and The Twin Towers , two short re-edits of Peter Jackson's Tolkien films into parables of contemporary capitalism; A Fierce Green Fire, a history of 50 years of enviro-activism, narrated by Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Ashley Judd, Van Jones and Isabel Allende; and Underground, director Emile de Antonio's '70s classic, later subpoenaed by the FBI, about the Weathermen militants and their ill-fated turn to violent revolution.

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